People arrive at a Covid-19 drive-through testing clinic in Sydney. Photo / AP
OPINION:
One day a rooster, the next a feather duster. That terse reminder that success can be fleeting has long been popular in Australia. For the leaders of the country's response to the coronavirus pandemic, it has become regrettably apt.
Until now, Australia has enjoyed a glow of global approval
for adroitly weathering the crisis with a "Covid-zero" policy of ruthless virus suppression. Having rushed to shut its international borders to non-citizens and non-residents last year, a measure that could stay in place until mid-2022, it deployed an enviable test and tracing system that has helped to keep its total Covid-19 death toll at 910. That is fewer than countries such as the UK have at times recorded in one day. Yet while Australia's stadiums and restaurants stayed full, and theatregoers thronged to Hamilton, the UK was doing one thing Canberra was too slow to organise: a successful Covid vaccine rollout.
"It's not a race," prime minister Scott Morrison insisted in March, as concerns grew about what critics have called a vaccine "strollout". He was wrong. Having squandered its early victory over the virus, despite being one of the world's wealthiest countries, Australia now faces a costly round of restrictions as it struggles to protect a largely unimmunised population from outbreaks of the highly contagious Delta variant. Sydney, home to a fifth of the nation's 25 million people, is entering its third week of a lockdown due to stay in place until July 16. Australia now stands as a warning to other nations, not least neighbouring New Zealand, that a fortress approach to the virus cannot succeed in the absence of an effective vaccine programme.